There was a time when an ARM version of Windows made sense. Only a few years ago, Apple iPad’s and Android-based tablets were creating a whole new category in computing and Microsoft was left trying to figure out how to play in that space with processors that were built for laptops and desktops. The result wasn’t pretty. So building a tablet-oriented version of Windows that ran on ARM made a lot of sense – get better power management, get great performance in a small foot print and do it on a lower cost platform. But this wasn’t just a wake-up call for Microsoft – Intel took notice as well. In the end, Windows RT was a great sacrificial lamb to shake up things inside Microsoft and Intel. But now it is no longer necessary and here’s why.Read the rest of this entry »

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This month I attended the International Association of Privacy Professional’s Privacy Academy and there was a lot of talk about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). BYOD is the concept of letting workers bring their own favorite mobile devices to work and use them to connect to corporate resources such as email, document portals and business applications for tasks such as customer relationship management.Read the rest of this entry »

Many of us have been following a legal case being fought in California in which 10 plaintiffs are suing Google over its practice of scanning the content of private Gmail messages for the purposes of showing ads related to the content of the user’s email.

The plaintiffs and many privacy organizations claim Google “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages” and this violates California’s privacy laws and federal wiretapping statutes. Google states that it has always done this and “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.” Google also states that the revenue gained by delivering context-sensitive ads to Gmail users enables it to offer a free service. In fact, Google was just awarded a patent related to scanning the content of emails, ranking the content and matching ads to the content. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week saw the latest chapter unfold in Google’s privacy battle with the European Union. In October 2012, France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes, or CNIL published a set of recommendations, on behalf of 27 European data protection authorities, suggesting that Google should address the “uncontrolled combination of data across services” and other data collection issues in its new privacy policy. The CNIL has now announced that Google has not provided a satisfactory response and it will proceed with recommending “repressive action” against Google. My colleague Jeff Gould published a piece this week on Google’s new battle with Europe and asked the question: who will win? Perhaps an equally interesting question to ask is: why isn’t Google complying with European privacy requests? No one can know for sure what Google’s management is thinking but one set of circumstances may be a factor in its lack of response. Read the rest of this entry »

KNOX and Centrify may have just given Samsung the springboard to leapfrog BlackBerry in the enterprise space.

Back in August I wrote a piece for AOL Government asking the question: “After BlackBerries, What’s Next For Government Mobile Users?” We were all witnessing the decline of BlackBerries as a favored mobile device for government users and I discussed the alternatives that existed in the marketplace. One of the strong candidates was Samsung with its Samsung for Enterprise or SAFE offerings for smartphones and tablets. The SAFE solution set added some valuable enterprise features, such as better Microsoft Exchange support, on-device encryption, mobile device management and VPN support to the standard Android-based platform for certain Samsung mobile devices. Since writing that piece Samsung has indeed proven itself and according to Gartner, Samsung has grown to be the largest supplier of mobile phones in the world and IDC has Samsung as the #2 tablet maker behind Apple.Read the rest of this entry »

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We’ve all read reports about mobile market share and the rapid rise of Android as a smartphone and tablet platform. Some reports – depending on how and what you measure – have Android share at just over 50% (comScore MobiLens US smartphones) and some as high as 72% (Gartner’s worldwide mobile device sales). One thing that has always puzzled me is why I see so few people using Android devices. Walking through an airport, a grocery store, a conference, a business meeting or on the street, I have been keeping an informal tally of what types of mobile devices people are using. I’m not sure what others see, but I sure see a lot of Apple mobile devices out there. I see people still using PCs on the plane (but a lot less than a couple of years ago), I see people with Kindles reading books and a random mix of other devices, but I just don’t see a lot of Android phones or tablets. While this is by no means a scientific sample, there may be a reason why we don’t see more Android devices out in the wild.Read the rest of this entry »

In reading the coverage of the FTC announcement that it was not going to pursue any real action against Google for favoritism of its own products in the web search market, I was surprised to see how few commentators have raised the point that there can’t be a search “market” when no one pays for that service. And that the users of web search are, in fact, the product that Google sells to the consumers of the market it does monopolize – online advertising. Or the fact that by using its advertising revenues to provide services to users for free or greatly discounted it can collapse those markets and own them as well.Read the rest of this entry »